


A Changing of Hands

by antistar_e (kaikamahine)



Category: The Book Thief - Markus Zusak
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, F/M, Fix-It
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-10
Updated: 2014-01-10
Packaged: 2018-01-08 05:14:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,942
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1128749
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kaikamahine/pseuds/antistar_e
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It happens like this, in a single fateful moment. A pilot sneezes, and the bombs, when they fall, are off-target. [AU].</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Changing of Hands

**Author's Note:**

> So, as you do, you read a book, you finish it, you weep. Then you immediately turn around and give it to somebody else so that it can destroy them too. I did this, and a friend (WHO SHALL REMAIN NAMELESS looking at you here, dear,) came up to me after and shook me very hard and shrieked, "FIX IT." 
> 
> "Okay," I said. So here's the AU where it's Nazi Germany, 1943, and everything goes slightly better than expected for everyone :)
> 
>  **Warnings** for direct mentions of the Holocaust.

-

 

In the cockpit of a plane whose belly is swollen, heavy with bombs, a pilot sneezes out a lungful of ashy German air.

"Ah, hell," he mutters, having instinctively caught it in his palm. He wipes his glove on the breast of his uniform and inspects the remainder. Then, a couple seconds later than he intended, he lets the bombs fall. They're off-target. They're almost always off-target. It's not like anyone's going to criticize him for it, right? At least he hit something -- that's the point.

When the bombs go off, everything jumps -- the buildings, the cobblestones in the streets, and even the air itself seems to leap with surprise.

In the basement of 33 Himmel Street, Liesel Meminger comes shockingly, suddenly awake.

Upstairs, she can already hear Mama swearing.

 

The second mistake comes at the hand of a clerk in Munich, who squints tiredly at the report in his hand and then calls over a supervisor. "Does that say 'Himmel'?"

"How the hell should I know?" is what's handed back to him, heavier than he anticipated. It bends at him. He strains to carry the weight of it. "I can never read those bastards' handwriting. What's the verdict?"

"One hundred thirty-three casualties. No survivors. They had no warning."

A pause settles itself between them. They're both thinking about how easily it could have been their own streets -- no sirens, no time for anything, just obliteration. All depending on the whims of a couple bomber planes.

"Hell," mutters the supervisor. "Send out the letters. Any soldier whose lists his home address is … Himmel, ja?"

"Yes, sir."

 

Alex Steiner makes it home first, from Vienna. As the train pulls slowly into Pasing, he steals glances out the window, seeing the places that have been carved out of the landscape in great scoops. He cannot imagine Himmel Street in rubble. _No survivors,_ the letter had said. No, no, that at least is accurate -- Alex is still alive, yes, but he won't survive this, he can already tell.

On the corner, Frau Diller's is tipped precariously off-balance, the whole building shifted and listing crookedly out over the street. The sight of it curls at the edges around his heart like paper brought too close to fire.

And then.

His three youngest children are there, suddenly, picking up roofing tiles from the sidewalk, pocketing them in the front of their clothes and giggling amongst themselves. Further down, Kurt leans over his mother's shoulder, pointing out something on her shopping list.

It's Rudy who spots him first.

 _Was he always that big?_ Alex thinks, stupidly.

" _Papa!"_

 

The next homecoming is three weeks later, when the preliminary clean-up of the bombed streets is nearly at its end. After Rudy's father explained to them about the letter that had mistakenly told him Himmel Street was among those parts of Molching that were leveled, they're almost expecting it. Mama wrings a dishtowel like it's got a neck she can break, standing at the window and peering out into the street. It takes a long time for news to reach the Germans fighting in the Russian snow. It takes even longer for one to get home.

Hans Hubermann Jr., when he comes, makes it as far as the mess of Munich Street before he's sawn apart, glued to the ground with shock.

An apparition approaches him. It's his father. He's carrying, of all things, a broom.

With him is a girl, whose hair is wrapped up under a cloth. They're both caked with dust, parched the color of tombstones. It took days after the bombing for it to stop raining from the sky -- Mama scrubbed Liesel hard behind the ears and rumbled aloud about how it was never going to come out, how they were going to have to carry those poor dead people and the ash of their things on their bodies forever. Rosa Hubermann could handle a great number of things, but the bombing of Molching rattled her, you could tell.

"Hans," says his father. His hand grips his shoulder, fierce and many-fingered.

"They said --" the Nazi says. He reassembles himself, drawing upright. The words clatter out of him, "They said --"

"Himmel Street is fine. It's heavenly, even, compared to these poor souls." He nods to the cleared street behind him. "No one's going to bomb a street named after heaven, son."

Two Hubermanns stand at the mouth of Munich Street. One carries a gun, the other a broom. Both have silver eyes.

One says to the other, "I hated your politics, but I never wanted you dead," and he's grateful that he got the chance to say it.

 

Two years pass like a book being bent apart, pages sliding into one another. Liesel and Rudy become fifteen, then sixteen. Hans Hubermann Jr. returns to war after his leave is up, but he doesn't go far. Germany is teetering, everyone can smell it, and its priorities whittle down to match. A young and zealous soldier like the Hubermann's son would be sent to Poland, to be part of a hasty and tireless execution squad. Visions of a great German empire are imploding, dusting into clumps of Russian snow, and instead, all that's left is to try to mop up the rest of the mess as quickly as possible before the inevitable comes.

Rudy's father refuses to go back at all -- they even go so far as to discuss the merits of injuring him and making it legitimate. They could shove him off Herr Hubermann's ladder, maybe, Kurt suggests, and hope he breaks something unimportant, like an arm or a leg. Or they could shoot a hole into his hand. (Alex Steiner protests vehemently against this one. What use is a tailor with a maimed hand?)

But in the end, the army simply isn't in a position to argue. Tracking down one defector and punishing him (again) is, at this point, a waste of valuable resources.

Both Hubermann children come home for Christmas brunch that year; Hans even brings his fiancé with him on their way to her parents'. She is almost as tall as Hans Hubermann Sr., with scratchy hair and an accent that wobbles out of her in a way she can't mask, more Slavic in its vowels than true German: his parents both hear it, but Hans Jr. himself seems deaf. 

They met on the train to the Russian front, she says. They are to be married in the spring, after all the snow melts.

In the post-meal confusion of cleaning up, Liesel sneaks downstairs to the basement. In a stranger act of thievery than is her norm, she'd stolen a thick purple candle from the Catholics' advent wreath earlier that morning (the cathedral itself, of course, had been carted off in many chunks and pieces on the back of a garbage truck, so the quiet little Protestant church diagonal to Frau Diller's opened its doors, until another church could be built.) She lights it and leaves it out for Max -- the mix-up of religious symbolism is lost on her, but she thinks that if he were here, he might like something to read by, at the very least.

Then, after the war is over and the Americans occupy Munich in 1945, Rudy Steiner comes kicking at her door.

"Well?" he says, when she demands to know what exactly in hell does he think he's doing. "Are you coming?"

Liesel has no idea what he's talking about. She glances behind her, but Mama and Papa don't even bother to get up when Rudy comes knocking anymore, so there's no wardrobe-shaped woman to curse at him for her in a satisfying way. "Coming where?"

Rudy grins at her, white-picket teeth all on display. His father had only recently been able to reopen his shop, and one or two of the suits that were now woefully out of fashion had gone to the Steiner boys. He's wearing one now, trim lines fitted over his adolescent shape. If Liesel didn't know better, he almost looks like somebody she'd respect.

"To get your friend, of course! It's over, right? So it's time for him to come home!"

He backs up through the gate.

"Come on, you lazy ass-scratcher!" he calls back, while Liesel is still flash-bang-stunned in the doorway, hope a painful radiating point of impact in her chest. "It's a long walk, and we'd better get started."

 

At the end of each week, Liesel and Rudy dress in their Sunday best and walk the long road to Dachau, wearing their shoes thin in the places where they'd once laid down chunks of bread. The Americans turn them away at the gate, week after week, and they walk the perimeter fence instead. In the months of July and August, the insects in the long grasses sing as they bake in the hot weather, but they fall quiet when the autumn winds come, leaving only the dry crackle of the grass as companions for Rudy and Liesel.

Then, in October, an American soldier approaches from the other side of the fence and calls out to them through the wire.

What he says is, "Strange place for a picnic, isn't it?" but when they just shake their heads at him, he switches to a limping, imperfect German and says, "Whoever you're waiting for, you realize they've been taken to a rehabilitation camp, _ja?"_

"I thought that's what _this_ was," Rudy kicks the words across the fence to the man. He gestures, encompassing all of Dachau with the incredulity of it.

The soldier's smile limps as much as his language does. "An in-between one. You cannot just throw open the gates of a place like this and let everyone out. Many of them were starving, diseased, beyond language, beyond --" he stops, seemingly checking the youth rounded in their faces. He measures his words. "They need somewhere to become human again, somewhere safe."

Liesel asks it. "Where is this somewhere?"

They go, her and Rudy, that very day. Even though it's Sunday and everything is quiet -- it's a camp of a sort, hobnailed together like the miscellaneous debris in a storage room, all shoveled together in one corner. There are no fences. It's not the threat of barbed wire and a watchman with a gun that keeps people here.

Somebody comes to the office door to answer their knocking. He has a face that looks like somebody inexpertly chopped it out of a block of wood, all hard chiseled slopes and lips with no flesh to them. The American flag on the side of his helmet is chipping -- it's missing half its stars. For years and years after this moment, Liesel will assume that this is how all American men look. They are all this man or Jesse Owens, with no room for variation.

"What?" he demands, and Rudy and Liesel don't need that translated.

"Hello, sir," she says, breathless from the strides she'd taken to eat up the distance as fast as possible. "Is Max Vandenburg here? We're his family. We've come to take him home."

From a little blue box, the man shakes a toothpick into his hand and transfers it to his mouth. He chomps on it and spends a long time scrutinizing them, teeth grinding down hard on the wood like gristle. There are a dozen and one things he could say, but it's a Sunday, and the only thing he can think about is how he hopes his soldiers have children who will come to greet them like this, hope stained red into their cheeks and their mouths buzzing, _is he here? We've come to take him home._

"I will check," he allows, and leaves the door open when he goes back inside.

Rudy and Liesel turn their heads, gripping each other hard with their eyes. She steps up to the threshold.

"Your name?" the man asks. He has a logbook severed in half on the desk in front of him. Names fill the pages in columns of letters, lines that neatly march up and down: a record of people finally accounted for.

She swallows against the baked feeling in her throat. "Liesel Meminger."

His carved-out eyes snag at her.

"Meminger?" he says, and flips a page. He tracks a finger down, down, down, taking so long about it that she can't stand it.

"Please," burbles out of her, and she takes another step inside, ignoring Rudy's hiss like perhaps she's walking barefoot on coals. "Please, is he alive?"

He looks at her with an expression of such sudden surprise, and then laughs -- his laugh is as choppy as the rest of him. "Yes," he answers her, voice swollen at the edges with the joy of being able to deliver such news. " _Ja,_ child, we have a man by that name here. He has you listed as next of kin. You are Liesel Meminger of … Mole-ching?"

"Molching," she corrects him. "Yes, yes." She says it one more time, "yes," letting it swing from her like it's on a cage door.

" _Ja._ In fact, you are listed as next of kin for two prisoners."

He could not have shocked her more if he'd flung her into a river.

Behind her, a voice: Rudy, always stepping in.

"What?"

 

They warn her that the former inmates of Dachau might not be fit for visitors yet. They have the right to refuse to see them, and in that case, to just come back. As many times as necessary. Liesel, thinking of how her papa had come to her bedside without fail when she was younger, every time, and how much that meant to her, nods. She and Rudy will walk here every day, if necessary, she's already decided.

But when they take her to the yard, it's only a matter of minutes before she hears footsteps approaching fast, an echo between the cardboard buildings. She's running, too, before she even gets a good look at who's coming.

She trips when she sees him, and he gets to her before Rudy can, hands catching under her elbows, helping her up. Their arms tangle in their haste to get them around each other, and Liesel's eye immediately begins to water following a glancing encounter with Max's wrist. 

Her knee stings. 

None of that can compare to how her chest _aches._

They don't say anything, just lean their bones together for what seems like forever and no time at all, and then Max's chin shifts against the top of her head and he says, "Hello, Rudy."

"Hello," returns Rudy from behind her, a shy beat of a sound.

Liesel shifts in Max's grip, looking back over her shoulder. Her hand, without meaning to, finds Max's bones and the knot of muscles that stretch over them -- his ribs, the sharp jut of his shoulder blade. She feels skeleton and muscle and not much else. Every part of him drags; his eyes, his hair, his hand across her shoulder, like he isn't sure how to lift any of it. He looks both better and worse than he did on Munich Street, on the day of that summer parade.

Max whispers to her, "His hair isn't as bright as you described it to me."

They look, and Rudy, having heard the exchange just fine, immediately scrapes at his bangs in a self-conscious way. It's grown darker as he lengthened into adolescence. Liesel had noticed that, yes.

"Has he grown?" Max echoes her thoughts. "Or, perhaps … he is not as handsome as you always insisted he was?"

"What?" Liesel draws away from him, gaping in outrage because she had done _no such thing,_ and Rudy says "hey!" in the way boys do when they aren't sure whether to be offended or not. Max's smile reaches his eyes this time, brightening the swampy color in them. He's _teasing_ them.

Rudy scuffs forward like he's going to say something, but then a second sound attracts their attention: another set of approaching footsteps.

"Max," says Liesel quickly. "Do you know who else here might list me as their next of kin?"

"I do." His hands on her shoulders turn her. "I owe her my life. It's becoming quite the trend with you Memingers -- keeping Vandenburgs alive."

There, at the lip of the alleyway --

A woman.

 

After her arrest in 1939, Paula Meminger worked in the women's sector of Dachau, the concentration camp seated like a cancer in Germany's very heart. Molching was the closest city beyond its fences -- a fact Paula thought of every single day. Liesel could have walked there in a single morning.

 

"Jesus, Mary, and Joseph," Papa breathes. "You were in that place for six years?" He asks exactly what they're all thinking: "How did you survive?"

Four chairs gather close to the Hubermann's kitchen table, each an old piece of furniture with its own achy spots that groan at contact. That's only four chairs for six people: Mama and Papa, Max, Rudy standing back by the stove with curious, mirror-like eyes, and Liesel and her mother, who are sharing a chair that just barely manages to seat both of them. Everything about them is skinny; her mother's arm hooks around her like a fishing line, holding her so close it's like they exist in the same air. It makes Liesel think of trains, how tightly her mother held on until she didn't anymore.

"It helps," Paula Meminger starts haltingly. Speaking in front of so many people plainly makes her nervous. Liesel squeezes her. "To pretend to be much plainer and stupider than you really are."

Her smile gashes at her face.

"It makes you invisible."

 

It's Rudy's idea -- leftover, she thinks, from that time they broke into his father's shop while he was away at war, just so he could be be surrounded by his father's suits on Christmas Eve -- but it's a good idea anyway, and one quiet, punched-out grey day in November, Alex Steiner knocks on the Hubermann's door and asks to borrow Max Vandenburg.

"He is not yours to borrow!" Rosa fires back immediately, putting her hip up against the doorframe and glowering. Only then does she ask, "whatever for?"

Alex holds up a coil of measuring tape. "I need to borrow his measurements," he says, and adds, vaguely, "It seems my sons grew up while I was away, so I'm out of practice with tailoring for someone his size."

It's a lie, but it only takes Rosa a moment of thin-eyed scrutiny to see through it to the kindness underneath.

She steps back and calls over her shoulder, "Max?" Her voice is so dry it scrapes. "Do you feel like being a model?"

The answer, when it comes, pokes its head confusedly around the corner, wobbly and a bit hard of hearing. " _Wie bitte?"_

_I beg your pardon?_

Alex Steiner comes through to the kitchen, where Max, Liesel, and her mother are gathered around a copy of the _Molching Express_ they they've dissected and have pinned down to the table. Paula Meminger has an office pencil in her hand, circling the words on the page that she recognizes. Liesel writes them down on the back of a page of sandpaper. They've collected almost a hundred words so far, which surprised and pleased them all, but perhaps none as much as Paula.

"Forgive me, Frau Meminger," Rudy's father says to the woman, after they've communicated to Max what needs to be done. "I would take your measurements as well, but I'm afraid pantsuits for women are not my strong point."

When he asks if Max would please remove his shirt, Liesel wonders if anyone's going to suggest the audience be not as big as it is. 

Max catches the expression on her face before the words can find their way through her teeth.

"This is nothing," he assures her. "I have no modesty left to be offended by all the staring, I assure you."

"Yes, but I still do!" she retorts, and a small burst of laughter from around the table drops into the awkwardness like a stone into still water, spreading ripples. Max grins at her, and spreads his arms for Alex's inspection.

He touches the measuring tape shoulder-to-shoulder, then shoulder-to-waist, and a smallness tears at the corner of his mouth.

"Well? Am I the model of wartime rationing?" Max asks.

"Something like that," Rudy's father replies.

The fact of the matter is: it doesn't matter that the Hubermanns will never be able to afford to buy the suit Alex Steiner makes to fit Max perfectly. If you don't count the outfit slapped onto him in camp, and you really shouldn't, then Max Vandenburg hasn't worn a single stitch of new clothing in well over eight years. And the expression on his face when he sees himself for the first time in the mirror in the Steiner Schneidermeister, dressed in clothes that aren't basement-grey -- it makes Liesel think of the snowman underground, how you have to choose the kind of joy that you will let kill you.

"It was a good idea, thank you," she tells Rudy Steiner, and with all her bravery, bumps her mouth against his cheek.

 

Winter, when it comes that year, grips hard at the messy, ugly skeleton that shivers in the place of the formerly ambitious German empire. The Hubermanns, with five mouths to feed, find themselves counting every pfennig, touching their round coin faces as if they hope they'll multiply. Hans still takes the train to Munich every day to work for the war machine, which doesn't stop needing bodies to file its paperwork even though other bodies have supposedly stopped falling to bullets, and takes the accordion to the _Knoller_ when he comes home. This is where Frau Holtzapfel's extra coffee ration comes in handy.

Liesel starts going in early before school to type up letters in the office. It doesn't pay much, but it helps.

She, her mother, and Max all suggest to Rosa and Hans that it's time they move on. They do it several times, prompted whenever the Hubermanns can't quite hide the pinch of poverty. Liesel's sixteen now, almost seventeen, she can leave school, she and her mother can find factory work or _something --_ there's always something to be done. And Max, always as desperate to leave as he's desperate to stay (that, at least, did not change,) says that he should probably be getting back to Stuttgart. Speaking of factories, maybe enough good blonde German boys died in the war that his old job is available again.

"What are you, stupid?" Rosa Hubermann tells each of them in turn, and then loudly clatters at the vertebrae of her washing board in its tub until they get the hint.

Hans, of course, comes in with the last word, which is always the right one.

"The world is crazy out there, trust me, I've had to sign papers for all of it," he shows teeth, inviting humor to a humorless statement. "There's no harm in staying where you are safe and loved, a little longer."

 

The fear doesn't go away.

It's a particular hitch in the lungs like a persistent cough or a scar that pulls at a certain movement. It's an oft-present reminder that just because the occupying forces say that's it, your prejudices are over now, you can't persecute your neighbors like you've been doing -- that doesn't mean a Jew or a communist's widow can suddenly walk about without fear.

It just becomes something that can be worn in public with a little less shame.

In the mornings, while Liesel is at school and Hans is at work, Max and Paula collect an errand list from Rosa, who grumpily shoves warm soup down them (or porridge, if they have it, which Papa jokes is because she just likes Max and Paula better, that their portions come without the weevils,) before sending them out the door. They always go together, there in the beginning -- "you look like soldiers!" says Bettina Steiner, on a day that she is sick and staying home from school with her mother and the new baby. "You are always walking in straight lines," and she comes down from the steps to show them, falling in neatly behind them. There's too much color in her cheeks from her illness, candle-colored like if you blew on her, she'd go out.

They stop walking and she stops, too, automatically snapping her heels together. The sound is flint-sharp, as fanged as a swastika, and in an instant, a peculiar kind of shame flashes across her face. She separates her heels again. 

She looks like she's about to apologize.

"Bettina," says Max before she can, and Paula Meminger watches with eyes the color of gravestones. "Do you think you could show us the way to the cobbler? Frau Hubermann gave us directions, but …" he shrugs, and Bettina nods with serious understanding. No one has to _explain_ Rosa Hubermann.

Nobody talks about how soldiers go everywhere in pairs because when they go alone, then no one knows where to look when they don't come home.

It's too easy for one person alone to be taken.

They pick up and drop off whatever Rosa Hubermann tells them to. They go up and down Munich Street looking for work. 

There's very little to be found, of course, but then there are days when old Helena Schmmidt needs help rehanging a cabinet door, and other days when Gertrude Koffmann needs someone to mind the little ones for "just five minutes, promise, I got a bit of coin but I don't got any quiet, please, I just want a smoke -- sorry, what? Oh. Well. You live with Herr Hubermann, don't you? He painted our door black for scarcely anything at all once, I'm not gonna forget that in a hurry, now am I, so I trust any one of his ilk."

The first time they come home with the groceries and more money in their pocket than they'd left with, Rosa's cardboard mouth folds at the corner, and she squints at them very hard, like when you first step outside in winter and the sun off the snow is blinding.

"What is she so pleased about?" Hans asks when he gets home, limping a little harder on his bad leg than he usually does. It's the cold.

By the fire, Liesel opens her mouth to provide the answer, but he seems to think better of it, because he shushes her:

"No, shh, don't say anything or we'll ruin it."

"Too late, you _saukerl,"_ grumbles out of the kitchen, curling around the doorframe like a cat with its hackles up, and the four occupants of the other room giggle like children.

 

Slowly, Paula Meminger learns to speak.

She and Liesel have the room upstairs, and they sleep back-to-back for warmth. (Max sleeps downstairs, on his mattress by the fireplace, and when Liesel asks him about his nightmares, he tells her it's impossible to have any, what with Rosa snoring at them like some giant guard dog. He says this within Rosa's hearing, and endures the insults that are immediately hurtled at his head with a smile on his face. Nobody sleeps in the basement.)

Her mother kicks fitfully in her sleep and is usually awake even before she is, waiting in the chair Hans used to sit in and holding a hairbrush.

"Hold on, Mama, I have to wash my face first," Liesel says, and when she has done that, she lets Paula braid her hair. There was never much time for it when she was younger, and Werner always pulled it out before long, anyway, so this is new, almost, the feeling of her mother tugging on her scalp.

The braids crown her head in a style so old it's in fashion again -- or at least that's what the girls at the office tell her. She thinks it's a compliment, but she isn't sure.

At first, Liesel does all the talking. Her mother pulls all the snarls in her hair to the ends and gently unknots them, and Liesel tells her about soccer and school and the Americans that drove their trucks down Munich Street on the day the war was lost. She tells her about Rudy and Ludwig Schmiekl's bloody mouth and Arthur Berg who saved their lives once. She pulls out _The Standover Man_ and the _The Word-Shaker_ and lets her flip through them.

"Will you read me the words?" she asks.

"Max and I will read them to you together," Liesel decides, and watches Paula turn the pages of what used to be Hitler's manifesto and now contains Max Vandenburg's drawings; the amateurish, the beautiful, the terrible.

When she finally starts talking back, it isn't about Dachau. Sometimes, she'll say things as an aside to Max that will swing open like a door to a dark room -- "Didn't Pietro say he had a cousin in Pasing who fixes automobiles?" and "Remember the woman who sang? She sang every morning and they couldn't stop her," and Max answers "yes, but Pietro also said he had a cousin who was on the _Titanic_ and survived" and "I still hear her sometimes. It's in the way the wind whistles off the frost, and I turn my head to look for her." -- but instead, when she finally starts taking out the things she's stored up, she talks about Werner. She talks about Liesel's father.

He was German, she insists. No matter what the Nazis said, he was a good German specimen, tall and broad and blue-eyed. It was his mind that they considered rotted.

"Was he a communist, then, like everybody said?" Liesel asks.

"Yes."

"Where did he learn it?"

"From me," says Paula Meminger. Her voice is as quiet as morning light in a graveyard. She kisses the top of Liesel's head. "I am not German."

 

Liesel turns seventeen in February. She gets a new collar for her school dress from her mama, because the other had finally frayed through at the throat. Rudy Steiner kicks a ball at her face and shouts, "happy birthday, _saumensch!"_ in the joyful way of best friends. She gets hugs from Papa and Max -- so many, in fact, that it becomes a joke, two grown men popping up like carnival toys when she least expects it, and she goes to bed that night with the imprint of their arms on her bones, love squeezed so tightly into them.

But the best present comes later that month, when pea soup and porridge stops being the only thing available to eat in the Hubermann household.

"What is this?" Rosa's voice comes out with claws. "This is not what I sent you to get. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, is this grass? I suspect we are eating like horses this week, then?"

"They didn't have the peas today, Frau Hubermann," Paula says placidly. "And I know how to cook with these."

"Well, then. You better make yourself useful, _ja?_ And for Christ's sake, you call me Rosa."

The soup is too watery, and it could use some pepper, but the lentils are earthy, hearty, and sharply-flavored. They eat it with bread, mopping up the last mushy remains at the bottoms of their bowls.

"How did you know?" Papa asks Paula, after Rosa threatens him with a wooden spoon when he tries to sneak another mouthful from the pot. _That has to last us until next Sunday, you saukerl, keep your hands out!_ "I wouldn't have recognized them as lentils. I would have passed them right up."

"We ate them a lot as children," Paula answers. Her words sit on the table. They cower. Their identity, their foreignness, cannot be hidden. "When times were hard. Where I am from, winter is different."

"Well, we're all grateful for it." Hans Hubermann lowers his voice, like somehow Rosa isn't sitting on the other side of the table. "Don't tell Mama, but --"

"One _word_ about my pea soup, and I will skin you alive!"

Papa winks.

They're a strange collection, Liesel thinks. An accordionist and his wife. A Jew. An Ukrainian prairie girl, who became the bride of a German boy and spent the rest of her life being punished for it, sitting here with her lentils and her bones. And her, Liesel.

She swings her legs happily, and goes to bed with that full feeling still in her belly.

 

The spring comes, and Frau Holtzapfel from next door reneges on two years of cease-fire with the Hubermanns. 

She stops answering the door to Mama's knocking. She doesn't let Liesel come in to read to her, so that's the end of the arrangement for extra coffee. She pretends to be deaf when Papa hails her in the street. She spits -- not at the front door, because that would involve coming in through the gate, and she can't do that because Max Vandenburg's there, sitting on the front steps.

She spits at his feet instead. 

"Filthy Jew," is her usual accompanying comment.

Sometimes other accusations join them, stewed-up like the contents of a slop pot and then dashed onto the stones in front of 33 Himmel Street. 

"Miserable, traitorous Jew-loving family," makes a frequent appearance and, specifically to Max, "look at you, able-bodied and young, and where were you when my sons were out in the snow, dying for this country? Hiding your filthy head, that's where you were, you _swine."_

Max, who is clean-shaven and straight-backed on the stone steps, smiles back at her and says, "A good day to you, Frau Holtzapfel."

Like Rudy Steiner, nobody needs to tell him who _she_ is. She is Liesel's caricature brought to life.

"You're right," he whispers to Liesel after one such encounter, while she still sits next to him looking miserably embarrassed. The glob of brown saliva spreads shinily out as it settles at their feet. So she spits, he thinks. What is there to fear from spit? Spit is not a whip or a gun. Spit is not a shower. "Her nose and chin are so long and pointy it's like she's got a beak and she'll peck your eyes out if you give her an opening," which startles her into laughing and saying, "did I really describe her like that once?" and Max, loyally: "Yes, you did."

He spends hours, now, sitting outside the Hubermann's front door, shivering until the weather grows warmer like it was his own force of will that brought it there. 

There are colors in the sky he's never seen before, he says, greys and blues that don't exist until the sun starts staying a little longer, shining a little brighter.

He's always there when Liesel comes home, from school or from soccer with Rudy Steiner, which has stopped being a full-street production now that their usual teammates have stopped going to school and work in other parts of town, and these days mostly just consists of Liesel and Rudy kicking a ball against the side of the school, pretending to curse each other out in American slang when the other inevitably cheats.

One day, when they come tromping up Himmel Street with their bags swinging from their hands and their coats unbuttoned to let the cool air breathe through them, they find Max sitting with Papa's accordion in his hands.

It breathes faintly as they approach, a slight stretch of its ribs and a burnt-out sigh of a note.

"Ah," says Max, and lifts his finger from a key.

"What are you doing with Herr Hubermann's accordion?" Rudy asks.

Liesel's quicker. "Are you going to learn how to play?"

Rudy has never seen that accordion in anyone's hands but Papa's, but Liesel remembers the way Rosa Hubermann slept over it, keeping it cradled to her like it was her own ribs she had to pump, to breathe, her own lungs deposited into her arms. And it brought everyone home.

" _Ja,"_ says Max. And then, "I promised."

 

The story goes something like this:

There was once a place where barbed wire kept watch like carrion crows, and in it, a Meminger crouched over a Vandenburg. They were filthy and grey. They were starving. The weather had dried them into people with the consistency of birch wood, picked-at and peeling.

At one point, it was agreed upon that Max Vandenburg would not survive the night. Whatever prayers there were to say, they should probably be said, and they were, by a man with a kindling-colored beard in a neighboring cot who only half-remembered the words, but it didn't matter, because he didn't dare say them very loudly anyway. Paula Meminger came and she brought the sick man presents. She carried them in the only place she could hide anything and it would not be found: her mouth.

They were words, and she handed them down with a ferocity she'd never shown anyone before.

They were chunks of salt and grief. "You cannot die." They peppered his face. "Do you understand? You cannot come this far just to die. You promised me. You promised that when we got out of here, we would go to Himmel Street and my daughter would teach me to read. You promised you'd learn to play your parents' accordion, that you were a fool for ever forgetting. Liesel will not forgive me if I leave you here. She will not forgive me if I do not bring you home."

 _Yes, she will,_ Max had wanted to tell her. _Liesel will forgive you anything._

But the woman's genius was this: 

To tell her that, he had to live.

 

On a Friday, Max plunks his way through the opening of a song he learned at his mother's knee at the age of seven, and when he stops to breathe after a minute or so, hard like he'd sprinted through the intervening years to get here, Paula says, "Look at us."

Liesel opens her eyes. She's stretched out in front of the fire, taking the luxury of drowsing with her head on her mother's lap. One of Paula's hands strokes her hair, the other has a piece of chalk and she uses it to build letters on a slate. She spells her name, again and again, while in the kitchen, Hans and Rosa talk lowly about Hans Hubermann Jr.'s wedding. Papa will leave for the Knoller soon, but not until Max is done.

("I fear I might not be cut out for music," he'd confessed, after the fourteenth time he struck a wrong note and somebody couldn't hide their flinch. "Not like my parents were. I'm probably better suited for boxing. Or writing in basements," and Liesel looked up, smiling.

"Nonsense," said Papa. "People are never just one thing. Keep practicing.")

"Look at us," Paula Meminger repeats, in a feathery exhale of a voice, the stretch of something small and warm behind a cage door.

"Yes," agrees Max. And, "how about that."

 

As the snow melts into dirty grey ridges along the sides of the roads, Papa adds to the errand list that Max and Paula run in the mornings.

"We're not quite there yet," he tells them. "But soon people will be throwing open their shutters and realizing just how dull the winter has made their houses. We need to stock up on these color bricks," the list exchanges hands; Paula leans over Max's shoulder, brows hunkering together like they, too, need to put their heads together to scrutinize the words. "And later, I will show you how to mix paint, _ja?_ It's never a bad idea to be prepared."

Outside the shop where Hans Hubermann gets his paints, they spot Bettina Steiner and Kristina Muller across the street. 

Both are definitely supposed to be in school.

They see each other in the same moment, and, clearly caught, Rudy and Tommy's younger sisters pause in order to whisper urgently to each other, cupping their hands around the other's ear. They clearly choose flight over confrontation, because when Max and Paula look back, both girls have vanished.

Liesel hears about this later, while she and Max are pumping water for Mama's washing, to be done in the morning while she has "some blessed peace and quiet, for a change." They are counting the stars; Max from one end of the sky, Liesel to the other, racing to see who can reach the middle first, a point designated by the scaffolding at the top of the hill that will be the new church steeple.

"Do you think they all have names?" he asks her in wonder.

"How can they?" Who could possibly name all the stars in the sky?

A noise, a scuffing of loose shoes on cobblestone distracts them, and Bettina appears. Kristina's with her, carrying a pot against her hip.

"Are you going to tell?" comes immediately out of the Steiner girl without any preamble whatsoever, flung to the ground between them.

Max lets go of the handle, and the gush of water gulps back to a trickle.

"Tell what?"

"Tell our parents! That -- you know --" her eyes dart towards Liesel, and she hisses the rest of her sentence, "That we weren't in school."

Liesel hikes her eyebrows up. "You little _saumensch!"_ she exclaims in surprise. "What were you skipping school for?"

"None of your business!" She draws herself up, scowling the scowl of best friend's little sisters everywhere. "Well? Aren't you?"

Max looks amused. "Why would I do that?"

The girls exchange glances. They're almost twelve. Their jumpers come short at the wrists, and they aren't quite growing yet, but there's a longness to their faces that suggests they're thinking about it. They're inseparable. Kristina's braid is long and brown and skinny as a rat's tail, her hairline marching high along her forehead, and Bettina has Rudy's hair, lemon-blonde.

Liesel tightens her arms around herself. The sky above them is scattered by sugar-colored pinpricks of light; there is very little streetlight in the poor sector of Molching to block them out.

"Where did you come from, anyway?" Bettina wants to know, surprising them both. Nobody's ever actually _asked_ before. Kristina edges around them, saying, _excuse me, Liesel,_ so that she can pump water into her pot. "Rudy says that you're one of the Hubermanns and that we should be nice to you, but that's all he says."

"I used to live with them."

"When?"

"Not too long ago. I had to hide in their basement."

This gets their attention.

Kristina cranes her head around, frowning. "Why?"

Max fishes for an answer, murkily scanning the ground like perhaps he's dropped it. "The same reason Rudy was never allowed to paint himself black," is what he finally goes with. "I couldn't go out like I was, either, but unlike Rudy, I couldn't wash it off, so I had to hide, instead, so that nobody saw me. The Hubermanns kept me safe."

Bettina nods, because that makes perfect sense to her.

"What did you do during air raids?" she asks, and then, seemingly not needing the answer spelled out for her, "Did Liesel come and read to you? She read to us. That kept _us_ safe."

"Bettina." Liesel is splashed with surprise, droplets clinging warmly to her skin. She hadn't thought about how it might look from a child's point of view: Liesel Meminger read in the shelter, nobody panicked, and when the bombs fell, they always fell elsewhere. The one time they didn't make it to the shelter in time, the bombs obliterated parts of Molching. Cause, effect.

Beside her, Max says something. 

It sounds a lot like, "What a word-shaker, _ja?"_

 

That summer, while there's no school, Liesel goes with her mother and Max and Papa up and down the streets of Molching, painting. She and Paula push the paint cart, Papa and Max carry the ladder, and Paula, it turns out, is very good at it. (Not as good as Hans Hubermann, of course, but they agree in a completely unbiased way that few are.) Liesel doesn't have much of an eye for straight lines, and Max is more of a menace than anything, always getting distracted by painting the sky as it looks that day, jaundiced yellow eye watching their progress against a blue-white smeary backdrop, and Paula comes and paints it thickly over in whatever color they're _supposed_ to be using. He takes a painter's pencil and chases her down and tries to mark her face with something, which means Liesel has to declare war on him as a matter of course. They all come home very dirty.

"I did not think I was hiring children to help me," Papa complains, very fondly.

One bright yellow morning, while they're touching up the trim around the cobbler's window and Papa is showing Paula how to stencil letters for a sign, Rudy comes running up to them.

Without slowing, he picks up his holler of a greeting and hurtles it at the back of Liesel's head. "Hey, ass-scratcher!"

Liesel wheels around, already slinging back: "you filthy pig!" and "Rudy Steiner, you _saukerl,"_ and "what do _you_ want?" volleys out of her without pause.

Rudy comes to a panting stop next to them on the sidewalk. He looks excited. He looks faultlessly, flawlessly German.

"Haven't you heard?" he says with great relish, because of course it's obvious that they haven't heard: he's the one carrying the newspaper. "They arrested the old mayor for war crimes!"

All work ceases.

Liesel: "They _what?"_

He thrusts the newspaper at her.

She spreads it out on top of the paint cans and tarps, and he crowds in next to her like he's going to read it with her, even though he should already know what it says, since he brought it. He bends at the shoulder in order to reach her. Her skin crawls with awareness, attention leaping away from the pages in front of her, and she wants him to move away. At the same time, she wants everyone to see, because if there's anyone entitled to stand this close to Rudy Steiner, with his wide shoulders and teddy bear eyes, it's her, his best friend.

He's the oldest Steiner child still living on Himmel Street. The elder siblings, Kurt and Agnes, both found work at a hospital up north, outside of Cologne and close to the border. 

Technically, Kurt is still destined to inherit the _Schneidermeister_ when their father retires, but in practice, it's the middle children who show the most proclivity for it. Rudy is a natural salesman, all ragged charm familiar to everybody up and down Munich Street, and his two younger brothers are the cleverest in their respective classes when it comes to maths. They will be good at business, in time.

Bettina and the baby are too young to have any clear idea of what awaits them besides more hand-me-down clothes and more hand-me-down sighs from Sister Maria, "Not _another_ Steiner."

And the youngest that Barbara Steiner still carries on her hips, the shape of it plain underneath her clothes, is a complete mystery.

 _What is that woman thinking, having more children at her age?_ Mama mutters, but not very loudly. She remembers when the newlywed Steiners first moved in next door. Her own children had been fairly young then, and now Hans Jr. is a newlywed himself. Time does that, and it's only the young who ever move away.

"But why would they arrest the mayor?" she asks presently, thinking of the man in uniform at the bonfire, slapping down fat, inflammatory words to a roaring German grandstand.

"They're arresting everybody they think had something to do with --"

He stops, his eyes flicking up. Liesel's mother watches him back, and Max stays perched on top of the ladder like a feathery brown owl.

"-- well, with the war."

"Molching's old mayor? Really? The only thing he's guilty of doing is nothing." He let the parades happen. He let Dachau sit like a malignant, bleeding lump outside of town. Complicit, yes. Guilty? Unless there's something that never came to light, she isn't so sure.

She thinks, belatedly, about the mayor's wife. 

The thought, at first distant and detached through the lens of years, suddenly rushes at her. She has not seen Ilsa Hermann since that visit to Himmel Street, when she gave her a small, blank black book and told her to write. She's not been driven to go see her, and so hasn't. How could three years pass like that, without much thought to the people it leaves behind?

She steps back. Rudy, still standing too close, catches her with his hands, steadying her before she can trip on the pavement.

 

They execute the former mayor of Molching. 

They don't give much explanation. When they are the victors of a war, and you are the losers, they feel like they don't need to.

It's a cool autumn day, and the sky is the color of freshly-fallen snow. Death takes the mayor's soul and falls upward into that white, white, whiteness without looking at a single face.

Liesel Meminger won't know it, not for many years yet, but after her husband's execution, Ilsa Hermann will gather her accounts and her solicitor and she will write a new will. She'll sign it in tandem with the cold wind at her back, coming in through the open window. It leaves her house, her books, and all of her money not to grasping relatives, but to Liesel Meminger, who had something of Johann in her.

When the news does reach her after the old widow's death, Liesel will sit at her kitchen table for a very long time.

When she stands, she'll faint.

 

But we haven't gotten to that point yet. 

We're not done with 1946.

There's more good news, and it's on its way.

It's July, and there's a visitor disembarking off the train in Pasing. He carries no map with him, no directions. Knowledge of where he's going is seared onto him, papering the inside of his chest the way a freezing man will stuff the insides of his coat with newspaper for insulation. And while there are some men who go their entire lives without once bothering to look at what's written, large and plain, on each ventricle of their hearts, for fear of what it might be, he is not one of them.

_Himmel Street 33  
Molching_

 

A knock fires against the Hubermann's door.

Not Rudy -- they all know the sound of his knuckles by then -- and not Frau Holtzapfel, taking advantage of Max's absence from the front steps to come complain about something, for the same reason. Could it be Frau Koffman, come to ask Paula Meminger to mind her kids at some future date? Could it be bad news -- about Hans Jr. and his wife, about Trudy?

Papa, who is closest to the door, gets up.

There is a man outside, with a soldier's posture and a soldier's haircut. He is the kind of man Frau Diller would be pleased to see salute in her shop.

The first question:

"Hans Hubermann?"

The answer, handed back to him across the threshold:

"Yes?"

For Papa doesn't recognize him, though something in his memory tells him that he should, faded like the afterimage of a flashbulb.

The second question:

"Do you still play the accordion?"

And then, from inside the house, a cry leaps outwards:

" _Walter!"_

 

Many years from now, when most of the buildings on Himmel Street are condemned due to structural insecurity and torn down, including number 33, there will be no one left here who remembers what happened here on the steps one swampy July evening, 1946. Nobody and nothing except for the dirt and the stones in the road, and then, eventually, not even them.

There should be a memorial plaque. There is, in a way, except it exists inside the people who were there, who saw.

It happens with a shout on the steps of 33 Himmel Street; a Nazi soldier and a concentration camp survivor embrace like young boys.

 

For Christmas that year, though money is still tight and Mama makes a show of pursing her lips and tsking over the small amount of coin they collect between them ("it's those damn Americans," she's quick to insist, whenever Liesel or Papa remind her that it's the best they can do, Mama, please, "oh, fine, or the British or the French or whoever, always extracting every pfennig from us all to pay for the privilege of bombing our cities, if they'd just let us recover in peace, we might have some actual money around here!" And that was Economics 101, by Rosa Hubermann,) Liesel's surprised with a gift of not one, not two --

But _five_ books.

"Well, it's not like we don't all know what to get you, _saumensch!"_ Rudy Steiner laughs when she expresses her surprise. He looks very pleased with himself.

His gift had been a play called _The Curse of the Mediterranean,_ which he'd clearly gotten from his American coworkers and was now expediently gifting on to her, because it's all in English and contains photographs of American actors from the corresponding moving picture of the same name. She doesn't know what came first, if the play was written about the picture or if the picture was adapted from the play, but it promises high-seas adventures and a dashing pirate. It's a very Rudy thing, she decides.

From Papa and Mama, she gets a romance that the shopkeeper at the bookshop by Papa's office in Munich suggested would be suitable for "a young woman."

"I told him you'd never met a book you didn't like," Hans explains when she gives them a questioning look. "But who knows, this might be the first."

"Thank you, Papa. Thank you, Mama."

(Liesel does not hate the book.)

From her mother -- Liesel calls both Rosa and Paula "Mama," and when she needs to differentiate, it's usually either "the nice one, which Mama do you _think_ I'm talking about" or " _my_ mother." She never calls Paula "my _real_ mother," because that's not fair -- she gets a botanical kind of book. It's very short and comes with beautiful illustrations.

"Perhaps we can read it together?" Paula offers shyly.

"You won't need my help," Liesel takes the confidence of that statement and kisses it against her mother's cheek.

Herr and Frau Hubermann Jr., who come for brunch, bring with them a tin of biscuits and a collection of fairytales for Liesel. There's a translator's note on the very first page, stating that no fairy tale survives translation entirely intact, and that these are best enjoyed in their original Russian. 

Startled, Liesel looks up, because surely Hans Jr., who dearly loved the Fuhrer and fought the Russians, wouldn't give her Russian childrens' stories?

Hans Jr.'s wife catches her eye. She winks.

The last book to join Liesel's collection that day comes on the evening train and traipses itself to her door through a late, mushy rainfall. At first, through the preoccupation of dinnertime conversation, she mistakes the rap at the front door to be something the wind threw up against it, until the rap becomes a fist, banged hard into the wood.

Walter Kugler, of course, is the one who pounds on the door like a Nazi, with Max behind him, beaming.

"But it's not your religion!" is Liesel's surprised comment, after all the shouting and embracing has been done and a present finds its way into her hands, wrapped with newspaper and stuck with a bow.

Max draws her into another hug like he's been starved for it, kissing the top of her head and saying, "And since when do I need the excuse of a religion to bring you a gift, hmm?"

"If it bothers you," Walter suggests. His voice is slow, deep, and thoughtful, and it meanders ponderously over their shoulders to settle in their ears. "We'll say it's from me."

She pulls them inside so the production of hugging and boisterous greetings can be repeated with the Hubermanns -- well, a lot of embracing on Max's part, at any rate. Nobody quite knows Walter well enough to embrace him yet, and in fact, Paula puts her back up against a wall whenever he's near; a lifelong distrust of Nazis, and the corresponding arrival of Walter and departure of Max did that to her. 

She and Max get tangled by the stove and hold each other tight for a very long moment, until Mama bustles them out of the way so she can offer the men some soup.

"Nonsense!" she declares, when they, in tandem, insist they couldn't possibly. "Paula did the cooking."

"Oh, well, in that case," and Max makes a show of pulling out a chair, and Rosa turns on him with a menacing shake of her wooden spoon and threatens, "Don't think you're not too old yet for a _watchen,_ Herr Vandenburg," and laughter shakes its way across the table.

"Hold on," Max says, catching Liesel as she slips around him. " _Wat ist los?"_

He touches the corner of her mouth. 

His thumb, when he holds it up to the light for inspection, comes away smeared with red paint.

Liesel rolls her eyes as hard as possible. "It's _make-up,"_ she points out, and resigns herself to enduring ceaseless teasing for the rest of the night. The lipstick, in its burnished golden-colored tube, had been a gift from Bettina and Kristina -- she hadn't asked where the money for it had come from. Criminal activity runs in the Steiner family, coupled as it always is with a giving streak.

"Are you meeting the young Herr Steiner later?" asks Walter Kugler slyly.

"Jesus, Mary, and Joseph."

It's only after the late supper, the catching up, and blankets have been procured for Walter and Max to sleep in front of the fire (there is, of course, no talk of them finding other lodgings for the night, because everyone knows they'll just go back to the train station and sleep there,) does Liesel get a chance to open the present.

It's a book, of course. She and Max are in the kitchen, underneath the window, which warms their back with the friendly weight of starlight, and Liesel's breath catches when she feels it in her hands; loose pages, loose binding. 

It's another book made by hand.

He turns away to give her the privacy of opening it for the first time.

**The Paintbrush**  
 _for Liesel Meminger  
from Max Vandenburg_

She leans against the sill, lifting each page slowly and letting it fall against the previous.

There are very few words in this one; it introduces a girl and a paintbrush and then lets the illustrations tell the rest. At first, the girl uses her paintbrush to write in straight lines up and down each page, drawing letters that become words that become a dictionary. And then she discovers that she doesn't have to keep to one page: she starts climbing them, pulling the paintbrush behind her. Her monochrome world gains color as she hauls herself up through it, drawing the stairs in front of her for her to climb, then adding trees and buildings and yellow-haired boys. It ends with her standing at the top of the second-to-last page, surveying her handiwork; below her, the sky is gorgeous and blue, marked with skidding white clouds and tightrope beams of light that fade as they progress upward, into the inkiness of a night sky.

On the last page, there's nothing but her shoe and a trail of dripping paint, disappearing upward.

"Oh, Max," she says, looking up to find him watching her with swampy eyes. "Thank you." And, "My mother would be able to read this."

He nods. Perhaps that's why there were so few words in it, she thinks.

Suddenly, she has an idea.

"Wait here."

She runs upstairs to her room, careful not to wake Paula Meminger, lifting her new books off her bedside table until she gets her hands on the one she wants.

"I meant to give this to you on the day you left," she tells him when she rejoins him in the kitchen. "But that felt too much like …"

She doesn't finish the thought.

As always, Max does not need help understanding Liesel Meminger.

"But you would rather give it to me only if I came back."

They look at the book. It's small in Liesel's hands. The cover is black and there are no words on it.

Somehow, it doesn't hurt at all, handing over _The Book Thief_ to Max Vandenburg.

 

This brings Liesel Meminger's total number of books to 23, and looking at the stacks of them pushed up around her bed prompts Papa into building her a shelf. He hangs it on the wall in her and Paula's room. 

They use paint cans as bookends, and Liesel starts with those that are oldest and most important; _The Gravedigger's Handbook, The Standover Man, The Word-Shaker,_ the water-swollen _Whistler,_ and ending on the other end with the newest, _The Painbrush_ tightly secured between the hard covers of the others.

 _Look at that,_ Liesel thinks. _The book thief has a bookshelf._

 

A meteor shower slashes across the sky of a place called Sikhote-Alin in February of the following year. 

The impact crater found in the woods afterwards is the only thing Rudy wants to talk about. The Americans at his work have him convinced it's aliens.

"You ass-scratcher," Liesel informs him with all the put-upon wisdom of her eighteen years. "The Soviets have bigger things to worry about than covering up the arrival of aliens from outer space."

"Yes, but," Rudy dismisses the logic of this with an eager, many-toothed grin. "What if?"

His job, most days, takes him into Munich. He even rides the train with Papa sometimes, but comes back much later in the evening and has too much time to kill in the meantime. The Americans occupying there spotted him at an athletics evaluation two years previous, and asked him if he'd like to come work for them. This time, Alex and Barbara Steiner were not there to say no for him, which is how Rudy became the perfect German poster child for postwar propaganda.

Of course, that's not what they were calling it then. Later, Rudy and Liesel will identify it for what it was, but at the time, it's just a job that allows Rudy to go to Munich to read speeches at rallies that are handed to him and get his photograph taken. It pays handsomely.

"It's all gone to his head," she complains to her mother one morning, as Paula Meminger brushes out the snarls from her hair. "He thinks he's _so_ handsome."

There's no mirror in their room, so she can't see the way her mother smiles indulgently at the top of her head.

 

After the fall of Poland to communism, and on the same day that the American President Harry S. Truman announces his plan to fight that spreading communist plague by signing a congressional act known as the Truman Doctrine, Tommy Muller marries his sweetheart.

It's a warm, sunny May day, and Karsa's hands tremble so badly when she addresses the guests that Tommy has to tap her and ask her to repeat herself so that he can translate.

 _Is it possible,_ she signs, slower this time. _To die of happiness?_

"Well, please don't do it _now,"_ Rudy calls over from Tommy's other side, and Karsa's laugh smears out of her, watery.

She's originally from Zurich; she's completely deaf and she talks with her hands, something the hearing-impaired Tommy Muller didn't even know existed until he saw her communicating with her parents outside Frau Diller's on a colorless Tuesday the year he turned sixteen. They'll say, later, that they both knew it in that moment: that something in Karsa and something in Tommy sat up straight during that introduction and said, _This. This is the kind of person I could marry._

Rudy, of course, is best man, and afterward, he leads everybody in a round of exceptionally hard stamping and clapping, so that Tommy and his new wife can feel it, shuddering into them through the floors and shaking up the air.

"You're going to dance with me later, right, _saumensch?"_ he yells in Liesel's ear during the processional out.

"Stick your dance!" she yells back.

On the steps of the church, he grabs her hand and spins her around and, caught off-guard by it, she twirls. Her hair scatters around her face.

"There," he says, triumphant. "A dance!"

" _Saukerl,"_ she retorts. He doesn't let go of her hand.

She thinks, right then, of how Karsa had told her once that her favorite thing were the days she came running down Himmel Street to Tommy Muller's apartment block and found that Max Vandenburg was playing the accordion on the front steps of number 33. It didn't matter to her that he played more wrong notes at first than right, because what did she care? She couldn't hear it.

 _I cannot miss music because I don't know what music is,_ she'd explained to Liesel, in that happy way she does everything. _It's no loss for me. I just loved watching it breathe in his hands._

 

Liesel runs down the steps in the courtyard with the wind at her back. There's a coolness to it that sticks its fingers down the back of her blouse.

Someone calls out to her from one of the windows. It's the kind of thing that's meant to make her swerve; a great, fat shout dropped down from above to splatter against the pavement.

She doesn't slow down. She's already late.

In the office, her lowly position in the pecking order means that she's relegated to the corner desk, where there's a gap in the baseboard where the walls don't meet up quite right. It lets in a draft on cold days that leaves Liesel's ankles feeling frosted over and stiff. She's taken to wearing two pairs of stockings to work, and in her last letter from Molching, Bettina suggested she use nail lacquer on the base of a laddering tear to keep it from widening.

It's perhaps because of this that Liesel feels no guilt about wearing boots when she's not at the office: they're much easier to run in, at any rate.

Rudy lives with four of his teammates in a ground-level room, right before the courtyard widens where it meets the road. Liesel dodges around a group of young men jogging mechanically in the other direction, and cuts across the grass.

Eduard Pflavelbergen answers to her knocking, a towel slung over his bare shoulders and a toothbrush making a pouch out of his cheek. Liesel registers all of that exposed boy muscle and her attention skitters back and forth in a mad dash like a rabbit caught in a beam of light.

"There you are!" Rudy levers his shoulder against Eduard's side and manhandles him out of the way. "What kind of hour do you call this!"

"Shut up and let's go, you ass-licking swine," Liesel answers, breathlessly and with great affection.

Rudy exits onto the front step, pulling the door shut behind him and not letting it rebound on the volley of catcalls and jeers that try to stick their feet into the gap. Outside, they share a commiserating, scornful look. Liesel has not set foot inside that dormitory and she has no intention to until somebody fumigates. It's overinfested with adolescent males.

"I can't believe they're trying to turn you into Olympic hopefuls," she says for what has to be the hundredth time.

"They're not so bad," Rudy deliberately sidesteps her friendly barb. "Besides, nothing's set yet. We have to qualify first."

They're quiet for a beat, imagining -- also for the hundredth time -- what awaits them if they _do_ qualify. Helsinki, for the Olympic Games of 1952! Rudy Steiner has not traveled more than thirty miles from the spot where he was born. The thought of traveling to Finland vibrates through him. Liesel isn't sure Rudy could find Finland on a map, to be honest; he spent most of those lessons in Sister Maria's class folding miniature paper airplanes to throw at the back of Tommy Muller's head.

Gallantly, he offers her his arm as they walk back through the courtyard, and she knocks it away.

She catches him looking at her boots, which are crusted over with mud and bits of grass, and knows she doesn't have to explain where she'd been, or why she's late. Self-consciously, she touches her hair, and picks bits of dried thistle off her skirt.

Sure enough, after a beat, Rudy ventures, "So how are Max and Walter?"

"Fine," she matches his casual tone. "And so are the bees, before you ask. We went up and opened up the hives -- to see which ones survived the winter, see?" It was the first time Liesel had done such a thing; standing by and watching the sleepy bees cluster across Walter's big, gloved hands, Max behind her with the smoker and grinning through the mesh of his mask. She's still so glad they decided to move closer; Stuttgart was too far away for everyone involved. "They'll harvest the honey later in the summer."

"Is there any profit in the honey business?" Rudy folds his hands behind his back, adopting a serious look.

"Enough."

The silence lasts until they've left the grounds behind, and then Rudy sidles in close, making a dig for her ribs with his elbow.

"Come off it, _saumensch,_ I know when something's bothering you. What is it?"

"Nothing, it's stupid," she shakes her head and he waits her out -- her best and longest friend, Rudy Steiner, who spent most of their childhood avoiding making her angry because he'd seen the bloody mess she'd made of Ludwig Schmiekl and had no desire to match him. Liesel Meminger has taken her fists to Rudy Steiner exactly once: it was a beautiful day, a parade day, and he had her pinned to the road. She beat him bloody. "It's just -- Walter keeps calling me 'Frau Steiner' and he won't let it go."

Rudy is unsympathetic.

"Well, whose fault is that!" he demands, and turns around as they walk to face her, his hands on his hips. "Marry me already, and then it won't be a problem anymore."

They cross the road.

"Seriously," Rudy jumps up onto the curb on the other side. "Why haven't we done this?"

Liesel makes an indignant noise. "Because you haven't asked me yet, you _saukerl!"_

"Well. I'm asking. When are we getting married, _saumensch?"_

She thinks about it, positioning the words behind her teeth and lining them up to fire at him in just the right way to make him trip.

"How about summer?"

He stumbles, right on cue.

"Late summer."

He sees where she's going with that, and bares his white-picket teeth at her. "When the apples are coming in?"

She smiles back.

"Shall we steal them, then?"

"No." It comes out of him with no hesitation. This time, when he offers her his arm, she tucks her hand into his elbow and lets herself be drawn into his side. He hasn't been climbing hills all day to disturb beehives; his hair is neat and his collar's straight, and he still smiles at her like it's something he'll give her every time she asks. Her, Liesel Meminger, the girl he's going to marry.

Her heart feels strange, pulpy, and overlarge for her chest. 

"No," Rudy Steiner says again, with confidence. "I don't think we'll have to steal anything ever again."

 

 

-  
fin


End file.
